Ink jet printers continue to experience wide acceptance as economical replacements for laser printers. Such ink jet printers are typically more versatile than laser printers for some applications. As the capabilities of ink jet printers are increased to provide higher quality images at increased printing rates, printheads, which are the primary printing components of ink jet printers, continue to evolve and become more complex.
Improved print quality requires that the printheads provide an increased number of ink droplets. In order to increase the number of ink droplets from a printhead, printheads are designed to include more nozzles and corresponding ink ejection actuators. The number of nozzles and actuators for a “top shooter” or “roof shooter” printhead can be increased in several ways known to those skilled in the art. For example, in an integrated nozzle plate containing nozzle holes, ink chambers, and ink channels laser ablated in a polyimide material, adjacent nozzles and corresponding ink chambers are typically offset from one another in a direction orthogonal to the ink feed slot. Such a design results in adjacent nozzles having different fluidic characteristics such as refill times which can result in quality defects and can limit high frequency operation of the ejector actuators. The offset is primarily due to laser ablation of the nozzle plate material to form the ink chambers. With a laser ablated nozzle plate containing ink chambers and ink channels, a minimum spacing between adjacent ink chambers is required to provide sufficient chamber wall structure for the ink chambers. Hence, a larger nozzle plate and corresponding semiconductor substrate is required as the number of nozzles and actuators for the printhead is increased.
Despite the advances made in the art of ink jet printheads, there remains a need for printheads having higher resolution that can operate at higher ejection frequencies without substantially increasing the cost for producing such printheads.